It’s Just Pet Food
Okay, for those people who are not fond of pets and don’t understand the problem, does calling it “animal feed” help?
Melamine found at California pig farm, because out of date pet food is sold to hog farms as animal feed.
Mad Cow Disease is spread by animal feed that contains parts from other diseased animals especially sheep with scrapie.
E. coli O157:H7, as in “[t]wo beef producers, one in California and the other in Pennsylvania, have recalled a total of close to 400,000 pounds of beef stemming from fears of E. Coli contamination,” is a result of raising on grain, rather than allowing them to graze. The cows’ digestive system destroys this virulent form of E. coli when they digest grass.
This is why it is important to inspect pet food/animal feed. This stuff can enter the human food market.
3 comments
I’ve never heard of grain feed carrying e.coli before. We had horses and 4-H show calves, and they went to the slaughter as soon as the livestock-show season was over, and never once have we ever had an “outbreak.” Everything that I’ve always read/heard about e.coli in beef has been from livestock who are fed the same animal parts as the cattle who got “Mad Cow” disease. Why in the fuck anyone would feed MEAT AND BRAINS AND GUTS to, um, HERBIVORES, I have no fucking idea. Factory farms never do make any fucking sense, anyway.
And yet people marvel that Chinese imports are poisoned. Look at what we do to our OWN food!!!
If/when it ever comes down to us growing our own food to survive, I’m going to have to be a hunter-gatherer, ’cause while I can field-dress a deer (even though I can’t kill it), I can’t grow ANYTHING. I’ve killed cactus. We probably need to start planning who’s going to cover what parts of the communal food supply process, once the entire country collapses and so forth — I’ll clean, butcher & cook the food/game, but don’t look at me to grow diddly-squat.
Amend the “herbivores” label before somebody corrects me. RUMINANTS. Cud-chewers. But they graze on grass/hay/ground cover, so they’re kinda both, huh.
The “bad” E. coli grows because grain to easy to digest. Grass requires different digestive fluids to process, and those acids kill the disease. It probably would work with silage or hay, but they are strictly concerned with weight gain on the factory farms.
All animals have E. coli or its equivalent in their digestive tracts to break down food, but the worst kinds are killed as the food moves through the system. It isn’t until you radically alter the diet that these problems occur.
If you grass feed before slaughter you can prevent the problem in the meat, but it will still be in the manure while you are grain feeding, and that can contaminate the ground water, which is probably what happened in the lettuce and spinach outbreaks.